Take 5 With Roy Fjastad

Roy is one of the lucky few who has a head for business, selling, and marketing besides being a hell of a fabricator. After working for Scotty Fenn’s Chassis Research in the early '60s, Roy forged his own path to start Speed Products Engineering (SPE), specializing in Top Fuel dragster chassis and creating a product line even competing chassis builders purchased.

1/4Roy Fjastad is still plugging away in his Full Bore shop every day. He’s built a succession of orange Bonneville cars, including his A/GRMR shown here, but started Bonneville and lakes racing in the ’50s before his dragster-building days.

After producing 225 dragsters, Roy sold the business in 1974 to start the Deuce Factory, leading the new wave in street/hot rodding. He won acclaim for reproducing the '32 Ford framerails with their complex shape and unique stamped detail, and for his product line for '32 Fords only. You’ve got to know your stuff to have a product line for a single-year automobile—even if it is the ubiquitous Deuce.

He eventually sold the company to one of his sons to start Full Bore Race Products (FullBoreRace.com) to sell his unique race-panel fasteners and assorted small components hard-core racers use in chassis construction.

Nearing 80, he’s still working every day at Full Bore’s headquarters in Santa Ana, California, and he’s still racing. It was his 35th year of racing at Bonneville in 2012.

HRM. So how did you do at Bonneville?

RF. Not so good—we bent some valves and never got to race. I only did one pull on the dyno before putting the engine into the car, and I wish I had done two because the damage was probably done on the dyno.

HRM. There’s always next year?

RF. I don’t know—I’m getting up there, and I’ll tell you I was physically beat out there this year. I may retire from racing.

HRM. Are you OK with that?

RF. Sure. I’ve raced at Bonneville for 35 years and before that with SPE and drag racing—I can’t complain. I started Full Bore as a way to stay in racing without the heavy lifting—all of my products are small and fairly easy for me to manufacture, which are considerations when your back is as bad as mine.

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HRM. You started out working for Scotty Fenn in the early '60s.

RF. Yes, for about two years. I was from the [San Fernando] and was in the Road Kings car club. We were all friends with Kent Fuller, who also was building dragster chassis. Scotty always thought I was a spy for Fuller. I’m not kidding. Every time he was working on something and I walked by, he would cover up what he was doing. He was a different guy. After that I worked at Tommy Ivo’s shop. Ivo had a shop for less than a year—he was so busy racing that he couldn’t devote the time to it.

HRM. Were you racing then?

RF. No, but I did have a dragster I ran in the mid-'50s. I had a partner on that one, and, of course, I had a family, and I was making $100 a week—and I could go drag racing every weekend. What the hell has happened to drag racing? Today only five people can afford it!

HRM. Do you miss drag racing—the competition and action?

RF. Oh, sure. Guys like the Howard Cams Rattler [1968 175-inch SPE chassis with body by Ken Ellis, 392 Chrysler Hemi]—we had fun. They were bitchin’ guys, their car ran good, and they had a lot of fun making it run. One time they were taking it to the Beach [Lions in Long Beach] and they told me they were going to run the car without weight on the front end. I told them no, you can’t do that, you’ll crash. But they insisted they were going to try it. I was so afraid they would crash the thing. They said, “Let’s bet.” I bet them $100 that they would crash. They take the car out and make a fast, clean run. I couldn’t believe it. I was ready to hand them a hundred-dollar bill, then they fessed up that they had filled the front axle, radius rods, everything they could on the front of that car with buckshot. So they paid me.

HRM. 225 dragsters is a lot of cars in just a few years!

RF. When I first started building cars, I would flame-cut the brackets. Cutting and then grinding the brackets—it took forever. I finally decided to have my brackets stamped out. I had 60 different brackets we made out of 4130. I could sell the shit out of them because nobody else wanted to be flame-cutting and grinding, either. Even other chassis builders would buy my stamped brackets.

HRM. Are there particular cars that stick out as special?

RF. Vince Rossi’s Parnelli Jones rear-engine dragster [known as The Flying Doorstop]—it’s one of the most interesting cars I ever got to do. It was my idea to do the body like a boat on the bottom so the air wouldn’t get trapped. That car ran 10 mph faster than everybody else for a whole year—you know why? No wing. Tom Hanna did the body for me. I convinced a customer this would work, but he ran out of money and sold it to Rossi. Jones sponsored it but got scared of the liability and got out of it, and that’s when the money ran out. It was so successful, I don’t know why others didn't adopt the ideas. Danny Ongais and a number of other good drivers drove that car. [In November 1972 with Ongais driving, it ran a 243.24 mph for fast time at the Ontario, California, NHRA Supernationals.

Also Ron Johnson had a car—I think this was in 1968. Bob Muravez was driving—he told me this years later. They’re at Long Beach and it’s a 64-car show. It was the first time out for the car. He says no car right off of the trailer ever won an event up to that time, let alone beat a 64-car field in drag racing. He does his research—I wouldn’t know.

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“I was making $100 a week—and I could go drag racing every weekend.”

HRM. Were you experimenting with weight at the time?

RF. Pete Robinson was doing a lot of that; he was a friend—I liked him and what he was doing. I did two types of chassis in the beginning: one for Gas dragsters and one for Fuel. The Gas chassis were 68 pounds, and the Fuel chassis were 88. But I started to worry because I was afraid a guy would sell his Gas dragster chassis, and then the next guy would put a nitro motor in the thing and it would collapse, so I started putting all of the uprights and brackets in all of my chassis.

HRM. Did you build any Funny Cars?

RF. I did a rear-engine Funny Car chassis for Bob Contorelli [mistakenly attributed to Woody Gilmore] and one front-engine Funny, but that was it. I didn’t really like building them—I really am a dragster guy.

HRM. Do you go out to the drags or get involved today?

RF. No, I don’t even watch it on TV—it’s not fun. I know I sound old, but the ingenuity is gone—everything is cookie cutter. Nobody can try anything because it’s all spec-racing.

HRM. Did you stop building dragsters because you didn't like the rear-engine-type dragsters?

RF. No, I did like them—you could play with them and try things. What happened was you had half-again as much work and half-again as much time in them, but charging the same as a front-motor car. I should have been charging at least half-again as much money.

HRM. Did you always get along with NHRA?

RF. Back in those years I was not on speaking terms with Wally Parks.

HRM. Why?

RF. I’m not sure—it was just that they didn’t like chassis builders because chassis builders were always giving them trouble. Actually, they didn’t like anybody. But they always fought with chassis builders. In later years, we were fine—he’d show up at Bonneville, and we’d talk for a long time.

When I was doing chassis, I would always go to the Nationals at Indy. I’d deliver cars to customers. I had a Dodge van and had a picture of a dragster and an SPE logo and all of that on the side of it. I was delivering three chassis one year—I think it was 1968—and I had them on the roof of the van. I’m in the pits with the van and the first day is fine, but on the second day NHRA comes to me and says I have to get the van out of the pits because I’m not paying for anything but I’ve got signs and I’m advertising. So I left the grounds. The third day I came back, and I still had the chassis on the van. So they sent the police over to escort me out. Chris Economacki and the ABC Wide World of Sports producers come over to me and say, “Look, we want you to put one of your chassis on the ground and show the viewers how you put one together.”

NHRA was screwed—I’ll never get over that [laughing]. Here we are, we’ve got the SPE logo on the backs of our shirts and we’re assembling one of our chassis in front of the van with SPE on the sides, and it’s SPE all over the place, and there’s not a thing NHRA is going to do about it. There was nothing NHRA could do. After we were done, I told my guys to get the chassis off of the van and deliver them and get out of here.

The next weekend at Lions we watched it in the pits—we laughed like crazy because we knew the circumstances.

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Fjastad Salad

The Flying Doorstop was unofficially the first into the 5s in early '72 at Lions, and Billy Tidwell set the national record at the same track in July that year with a speed of 239.64. Danny Ongais bettered it to 243.24 at the '72 Supernationals at Ontario Motor Speedway for the first 240-plus-mph national record. (Per NHRA, Mike Snively was officially the first in the 5s at the same event.)

Speed Products Engineering produced 225 Top Fuel and Top Gas dragsters. There were just 12–14 with rear-engine configurations and two Funny Cars—one front-engine and one rear-engine.

Roy’s oldest son, Carl, owns the Deuce Frame Company in Santa Ana, California, producing hot rod chassis and components just like he did at The Deuce Factory. See DeuceFrame.com.

Roy’s middle son, Roy Jr., owns West Coast Street Rods in Huntington Beach, California, and also builds hot rods and components like he did at The Deuce Factory. See WestCoastStreetRods.net.

Roy’s only daughter, Kathy, is married to Top Fuel legend and former NHRA exec Carl Olson of the Kuhl and Olson team.